Re: [Qemu-devel] Question on kvm_clock working ...

[Philipp Hahn <hahn@univention.de>]

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Hello Al,

I just debugged a kvmclock bug, so I claim to have some knowledge in this area 
now, but please take my answer with a grain of doubt.

On Monday 12 September 2011 15:21:25 al pat wrote:
> Still seeking your guidance on this. Appreciate any pointers you may have.

You have to distiguish between the real-time-clock (RTC), which in hardware is 
a battery powered clock running even when your PC is powered off. Since it's 
slow to access, most Linux distributions read out its value once during boot 
using "hwclock --hctosys --utc" and than don't care about that clock any more 
until shutdown, when they write back the system time to the RTC 
using "... --systohc ...".
During runtime, other methods are used for time keeping: Either by counting 
regular interrupts, using the ACPI-PM clock, or the High Performance Event 
Timer (HPET), or the Time Stamp Counter (TSC) register, or ...; 
see /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/available_clocksource for a 
list of available clock sources.

For virtual machines there is an additional clock source named "kvmclock", 
which uses the host clock and the TSC: The host exports its current system 
time (plus some configurable offset) and a snapshot value of TSC register 
when doing so. Than the guest can interpolate the current time by using the 
exported_system_time + scale * (current_TSC_value-snapshot_TSC_value). This 
kvmclock doesn't have anything to do with the RTC clock as far as I know.

Now to your problem: You should check the value 
of /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource in your 
guest. If it is somethong other than kvmclock, you should if 
using "hwclock --hctosys --utc" re-synchronizes your guest clock to the host.

Sincerely
Philipp
-- 
Philipp Hahn           Open Source Software Engineer      hahn@univention.de
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